Some House members have been reimbursed more than $80,000 since 2010 for driving their own car on official business. The practice is legal, though most representatives avoid doing so.
Continue readingNow it’s easier to account for how the Senate spends your money
We've extracted three years of Senate disbursement itemizations from the original spending reports to make analysis of the public's money easier.
Continue readingVendor blamed in outage paid $1.4 million last year for services
Fireside21, a web services company fingered as a possible culprit behind the mass outage of congressional sites in the wake of Monday's televised presidential address, received over $1.4 million from House offices for web services last year, disbursement data shows. The total highlights the dominance of just a few companies providing congressional web services, a category in which five companies received 79 percent of the $5.5 million pie.
On Monday, speaking during a prime-time address, President Barack Obama asked viewers who favor a balanced deficit reduction approach to contact Congress. Several members' websites stopped responding to requests ...
Continue readingHouse Members, Committees and Offices Spend $1.36 Billion in 2010
In 2010, members, committees and other offices of the U.S. House of Representatives spent more than $1.36 billion on salaries, benefits, office equipment, travel, consultants and other expenses. Of that, the largest expense--about $1 billion--was for salaries and benefits, followed by spending on rent and communication costs, technology and related maintenance costs.
Nine of the ten biggest spenders were Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former members Dana Titus, D-Nev., Scott Murphy, D-N.Y., and Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Ohio. Half of the top ten spenders were from California.
Lawmakers do not pay out of their member ...
More Transparency for Official Expenses in the House
Yesterday, Rep. Gary Peters introduced a bill that would require reports on House Members’ expenditures to be posted on House.gov.... View Article
Continue readingHouse disbursement data for 2010 now online
We’ve released a cleaned up version of the House disbursements data that covers the first quarter of 2010, during which the House spent more than $339 million on salaries, expenses and equipment.
Last month we aggregated and analyzed all the data in the statement of disbursements, which the House started publishing online in a PDF format in December 2009, showing for the first time the private firms that do the most business with the House.
To make this data useful, the Sunlight Labs team had to parse the information in the PDF so it could be searched, sorted and ...
In six months, House offices spent $673 million on salaries, equipment, expenses
In the final month of fiscal year 2009, House committees and offices went on a shopping spree, spending more than $60 million left in their budgets before it disappeared. More than $12 million went towards purchasing computer hardware, which could include new laptops and desktops.
According to a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group analysis of six months of congressional spending data released by the House Clerk's Office, House members and
various committee offices spent more than $673 million in the last half of 2009 on salaries for staff, travel and outside vendors, who help with everything from tracking constituent information ...
59063
